It couldn't have been me.See, the direction the spackle protrudes.A noisy neighbor? An angry boyfriend? I'll never know. I wasn't home.I peer inside for a clue.No! I can't see. I reel, blind, like a film left out in the sun.But it's too late. My retinas.Already scorched with a permanent copy of the meaningless image.It's just a little hole. It wasn't too bright.It was too deep.Stretching forever into everything.A hole of infinite choices.I realize now, that I wasn't looking in.I was looking out.And he, on the other side, was looking in.-Monika

Umm.. okay? Well regardless of that interruption I just wanted to thank everyone at the start of our sixth year! Thanks to all the staff for running the place as well as the members to take a little initiative keep this place fun! Thank you for being a part of this forum everyone!

Thank you to everyone who is and has been a part of Kafuka. It's hard to believe that it's been 5 years!

Sorry I wasn't able to do a banner like I usually do. This year has been one that's pretty much directed me away from my usual activities. Life is life after all. .

Still I need to make sure to mark the occasion. I appreciate all the support over the years and everyone who calls Kafuka home.

Thanks you KP, and all the admins, and mods for keeping the place going! I don't think I could have done it with out any of you! Seriously.

While I may not be around IRC or the forums as been much at the moment I have better access to Discord do to the mobile nature of it. I'll be honest I am not that active there much as well due to life™, but it is actually more than most. It's become a bit more active as of late and I do encourage everyone to at least give it a try. I'd like to work with it more when I can finally get some breathing room.

I hope everyone had a good holiday and I look forward to the year to come!

First off I am pleased to announce we are opening up a new rom hacking forum! (Well the technical term is modding) shibboleet and Squiddy approached me about seeing if we could host a forum for the research & development of custom content for Wii U games. This being a brand new field has a lot of possibilities. Starting today the forum is open and shibboleet will take the lead. This forum will have it's own separate rules in addition to the main rules for Kafuka. Please make sure to read them. They will be posted inside the forum as a stuck thread.

Additionally I've shuffled the staff a bit. I have retired a few of the inactive staff members until such time they are active again. shibboleet has been appointed as a Local Moderator for the Wii U Modding forum. In addition I've moved KP up to Root (I guess Acmlmistrator it's called now heh) from Admin. His role has not changed. The reason he has been given root privs is to be a backup to me. I want to make sure that if I am busy or something happens there is a backup that can do a few critical tasks an Admin cannot do. I've worked with KP from the start on the project that became Kafuka. While this change is considered temporary, it will likely be for the long haul.

I would like to thank Squiddy for being the initiator of this idea. Without her this would not be possible.

I hope to see all those cool Wii U Mario levels soon!

Addendum: I've also added Marionumber1 to have moderation duties for our Wii U forum by recommendation of shibboleet. He is currenly not a part of over all staff. He will run the IRC channel (#WiiU), and help populate content on our the new forum.

News as of 4/9/15: I've turned on the "Extended Profile" system for testing to everyone. They should just act like everything else in editprofile. Let me know if it there are any issues or it doesn't work for you.

Most of the issues should be resolved otherwise. Please let us know if you run into anymore. Hopefully I can get with KP This weekend and get the themes fixed from my boo-boo.
*END*

Kafuka has been upgraded to the current develop branch for testing. As this is still a beta build please let me know if you notice any issues and what they are.

The following changes have been made:

By Squidgirl:
*Various code cleanup and fixes
*All redirect pages have been replaced by instant redirects
*Legacy powerlevel permission system and token permission system removed
*Permission scope splitting such as editing your title, editing a specific user's displayname, editing all users' username color, etc.
*Error handling for forum not found, no permission, etc.
*Posting toolbar now has buttons that can be clicked as opposed to just the symbols
*Various changes to administrative pages such as undeleting groups, sprite category editor, calendar event editor, Administrator Tools
*Option in memberlist to sort by displayname
*Deleted Posts Tracker
*Banhammer
*Yearless birthdays
*Announcement titles can now be edited by moderators
*Quickmod checkboxes for moderators
*Posts by forum, thread, and time of day
*Private messages have the posting toolbar and support disable post layout and mood avatars

My stuff is small and mostly cleanups. As always you can read the git log on bitbucket for the changes.

Edit: On the following.. got most of the assets back without issue. Just waiting on KP to be around when I am for some free time to go over the themes I may or may not have. I have commit them back into the tree this time.

Now for the issue on my part. While doing a merge I forgot that there was a change made to the faq.php. I had an issue with fixing the commit since both were different enough. So I attempted to back out of the commit. In doing so I forgot one important detail. git reset clears ALL untracked files. So that means what exactly...

*Sigh*. A lot of the Kafuka specific graphics files and themes were purged. Oh well I can 't undo it. I normally do a file tree back up too, but I failed to do so this time. I also normally do have git track it, but the last little bit I haven't since we really don't update Kafuka often. I do have everything, but it's not easily accessible at this hour, so I'll have to fix it over time. No worries, it won't effect anything major. Expect broken images sprites, badges, and maybe some themes that need updated. If you see anything like that point it out to me in case I don't see it. If you provided anything that is missing or broken contact me on IRC to resubmit it to me just to make sure it's the up-to-date.

Sorry about that. That stuff isn't the update.. Well enjoy the update.. or try to..

First place will receive a badge (), 10000 Coins, and 3 Frog Coins!
Second Place will receive a much less shiny badge (), 5000 Coins, and 1 Frog Coin
Third Place will receive 2000 Coins, and 1 Frog Coin.

So who gets what? Well the the almighty poll as spoken!

1st: Trelior. Moon.. want... to.. KILL.. ME>>>> Congratulations! 2nd: A tie! (not the kind you wear.) Ｅｐｅｌｅ for her cute layout witth the hungry pumpkin... and KP with a very festive layout that had the right amount of menace!
3rd: Nicole with her wonderful subtle but cute opposites.

Also we have given everyone who didn't already receive a badge one for their participation! ()

Kafuka has successfully moved to a new server! This should help with the many issues we've had over the last 2 months or so. At the time of writing this DNS hasn't migrated over. It may take a few days for it to work so please use the alternate address: http://kafuka.emuz.us until it is completely migrated over.

Some things may not work quite right. Please let us know if you find any.

Notice: Do to malicious program on DJ Bouche's sever we are going to have to rebuild the server than Kafuka is hosted in. Unfortunately I can't elaborate at the moment. Please save the following address: http://kafuka.emuz.us/ as when the site comes back up in may be under that temporary address as we build it. (doesn't exist yet)

Also you can check #kafuka and my twitter @possiblyemuz for status updates.

Tonight I've updated the code to our latest development version. Normally I would only use code from the stable branch, but I'd like to get a bigger test set as we work on the last things moving forward to 2.5.3.

A few of the changes are:
AB1 Style RPG sidebars: Kafuka has those set only for themes that have it defined on. (Right now it's just AB1 classic themes) This actually is themed per theme. So Kafuka, Purple have their respective images from before.
RPG EXP bar from AB1: (However I need everyone to follow it closely to make sure it's working right.)
Define a custom nick color per user: Right now I've got access to this disabled to anyone but Root Users. I've set one for myself so we have a test case. (I'm unlikely to be giving these out very often.)
Memberlist changes: now supports ascending and descending sorts. Displays appropriate nick/group colors.
Changed now the NEW indicators display. They are also theme-able
Added support for changing group colors per theme. This can be seen Tyty's diet board2 theme. Some of the colors are changed to show up better on a light theme
Added &lvlbar&
+1 has evolved into a full favorite threads feature. Every thread you +1 is considered a favorite thread. Favorite Threads link is currently next to Post Radar
There has been some changes to the sprites and badges system. Most of those are on the admin side.
Adding the AB1 Daily Cycle
Extended Profile Fields: It's an advanced system of adding fields to the profile page created by DJ Bouche, but it's not quite ready for prime time. My profile currently has one set for twitter. Some that are being worked on are 3DS friend codes (doesn't work yet), AIM, Yahoo, Facebook, etc. I may ask for some volunteers to test them out a bit later on.

There is more, but mostly it is unfinished or inaccessible right now. Since this is development I would expect the board to be updated a bit more frequently compared to what stable is updated. As I would expect some of these new things may have bugs to be worked out, so let us know, and be patient with it.

-Emuz

A small note from me. When linking to usernames, you will need to use @"Username" to link to a username now. You must include the quote marks.
-Gywall

Today we have finalized the minor version 2.5.2. Normally I'd list everything that has changed since, but this version is finally at a point we feel is a good place to open up the source. Yes finally!

Why didn't we do this before? Well mostly I was trying to make sure to live up to a promise I made to provide an easy to install version as to not suffer the same fate as the versions of AB1 have been in the past. The second one is the now archived 2.6 branch needing more work to get working than we have time for.

Bitbucket supports Pull Requests, and this means for those who are unfamiliar with the term anyone can contribute code, bugfixes, and features without having to be added to the repository as an editor.

Another change that we are making is we are now opening up the AB development seconds on the board. First is the irc channel: #abdev on irc.nolimitzone.com.

Next the development forum will be opened. This channel should be used for features, requests, GIT issues, and installations. I've also moved the Bug report forum to the Dev corner category. That will be just for bug reports from now on. (Eventually we'll move the non-bug related ones over as well)

That's the basic info. More detailed information can be found on the forums, Bitbucket, and IRC.

As the development of 2.6 has progressed it has grown to such a massive update that I figure I would take little time and pluck out a few of the more minor updates and apply them to our current branch. Today I've back ported one new feature, one new [tag], 2 classic AB ranksets, and all the new themes not yet on Kafuka.

The smallest of the updates was the addition of a [ irc] tag. Basically all it is is the code tag without syntax highlighting. It's purpose is to use it for IRC quotes and anything you used to us the [ code] tag for that doesn't need colored.

Ex:

return -1;

vs.

17:10:31 MrRean has joined (Derp@c-71-200-127-119.hsd1.md.comcast.net)17:11:05 < Danika> yeah, stores like GameStop and FYE have blank cases of the DVD/Blu-ray/game/whatever17:12:00 <@Gywall> I find it hilarious when people shoplift blank cases.17:12:34 < Danika> it says "DISPLAY BOX - Bring to cashier to exchange for product"17:12:52 < Danika> they do that with stuff like nicotine gum and baby formula here too, in some stores17:15:10 < Danika> couple days ago I was at ShopRite, I only had two items and the woman in front of me was buying a perfume (which they keep in the back room along with nicotine gum, Robitussin, baby formula, etc.) and it took like 6 minutes or so17:15:19 Nicole has left IRC (Quit: hm)

Mind you in the future further differences may be applied to it

The other big update is I've ported @Scrydan's wonderful implementation of the ranks page that ABII has been missing since.. well 2005. Right now it acts mostly like it did in AB1.92.. ie: only shows people on that rankset, but it won't filter for inactive.

We have added two of the classic ranksets from AB1 to mix it up a little. The first one is a port of Dots by @Xkeeper. If you've never seen this one before it's basically a bar made of dots that indicates your rank. I've altered it slightly to have the numerical info as hover over to make it more compact. It provides our first alternate rank system..

The second ranks are the formerly lost Kirby rankset made by Yoshidude. I in fact didn't know they existed until I was reading the archive.

I've also added 4 new themes:
Pinkielicious by @Ijah
Kafuka Gold by @Dirbaio
Left Mouse Button Purple variant and Binary Green by @Lunaria

And now we can move on with the whole doomsday thing. (Until some random guy decides to pick another dat out of there hat of course. lol)

That's great, it starts with an earthquake, birds and snakes, an aeroplane -
Lenny Bruce is not afraid. Eye of a hurricane, listen to yourself churn -
world serves its own needs, regardless of your own needs. Feed it up a knock,
speed, grunt no, strength no. Ladder structure clatter with fear of height,
down height. Wire in a fire, represent the seven games in a government for
hire and a combat site. Left her, wasn't coming in a hurry with the furies
breathing down your neck. Team by team reporters baffled, trump, tethered
crop. Look at that low plane! Fine then. Uh oh, overflow, population,
common group, but it'll do. Save yourself, serve yourself. World serves its
own needs, listen to your heart bleed. Tell me with the rapture and the
reverent in the right - right. You vitriolic, patriotic, slam, fight, bright
light, feeling pretty psyched.

It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.

This is what's been diverting my attention for the last 2 weeks or so. The story goes a long time ago I did a little server called tRO. Well a few of the guys who help to make it got together (a few times). This evolved from 2008's tRO3 to NotRO, to 2Dudes1RO. (Named so due to @Ferdal and I talking about this RO stuff we left unfinished.)

It's more in the style of tRO1 where it's just for fun. Like with tRO you can just chat if you wish, but you won't be making the most of the game.

In the 2.5.1 update @Gywall has implemented a new system for the user birthdays. This however required a db changes that wouldn't allow us to keep everyone's birthdays. I was looking into conversion but we had less than 40 entries for birthday so I have saved it out but it'll just be faster is everyone fixes theirs than have a script or me manually converting them...

Please review your profile to make sure if yours is missing. (I did update a handful by hand as a test, so if you have one that would be why. )

First off I would like you to congratulate @Nicole in a promotion to Full Moderator! I made the decision to add her to staff to help cover the afternoon, while giving a fresh perspective to our staff. Why not local moderator you ask? Well on a board like this Local Moderators really don't work. Local Moderators will be reserved for hosted forums form now on until we grow to a point where we need it. Also I will be asking Nicole to do a few things in a near future that will be easier if done as a member of staff.

Second off due to the fact that I won't be as active this month I have appointed @Gywall to a temp Administrator position to cover the (from my perspective) early morning time frame, and allow one addition person who can handle spam bots if we get them.. His term will end on 8/1/2012. Until such time he will be returned to Full Moderator in accordance with the new policy on Local Moderators.
Please congratulate him!

Also DJ Bouche as stepped down to a Developer position. He's just doesn't have the time to really be an admin for the board, and would just like to work on the code.
His slot will be open until at least the end of @Gywall's term.

To recap: We need Sprites that fit the Retro era of gaming, preferably 8-bit ones. We need to start out with CORE FRANCHISES at first. If we get enough, then we can branch out to 16-bit and more obscure (and non-game oriented) Sprites.

Requirements are stated as follows:- Must not blend into background easily. Make a black outline around (and inside) them if the game was designed with a black neutral color. (See Metroid sprites for a good example)
- Must be size optimized. No .bmp files. If you use a non-lossless format, make sure it's not noticeable.
- aGIF for animation preferred. PNG or GIF for still sprites accepted. Indexed PNG's are nice for the ability to specify palettes. (A palette of 64 colors is ideal; if you need more, 128 or 256 is also acceptable)
- Use Dropbox for your uploading needs. I would love to have you guys use this link because it's a referral link; anyone who uses it nets me a bonus. I'd appreciate it. On top of that, it's really the best upload service out there. No ads, no captchas, no bullshit. Drop files in this local folder and they go wherever you have Dropbox installed. You can even access them through the website!
- Optional: Include a description and a mouseover text for your sprite.
- Optional: Remember to make your Sprite with an indexed palette, starting with 64 colors or 128 or 256 if you need more.
- Optional: Animate your Sprites. The extra mile adds a nice appeal to the feature.

Here are the suggested franchises we'd like:

SMB2 (and the poison mushroom from 2j)

SMB3

SMW

SM Allstars variations of SMB 1-3 (this one is the one Emuz and I are looking forward to)

Super Metroid

Yoshi's Island

Zelda 1

Remember, participation is rewarded! Not much we can do right now in terms of practical, useful stuff; but things are planned, and you won't be forgotten!